Uncategorized

This is not so much a philosophy as the results of science that I can no longer deny, and so I live according to the science – in large part because it is advantageous.

1. We are an expensive life form. Particularly our brains.

2. We must acquire, and we acquire at cost to ourselves.

3. All our emotions are nothing but reflections in state of that which we plan to, are in the process of, or have acquired an interest.

4. Cooperation is logarithmically more productive than any action an individual can take, and therefore we must cooperate to survive. (Possibly as much as ten thousand times as productive.)

5. People are purely rational, not moral or immoral but amoral: they cheat and try to acquire disproportionately from cooperation, they free ride, steal from, and prey upon others. This is why we demonstrate altruistic punishment of cheaters in all walks of life, even at high personal cost: to prevent defectors from cheating.

6. The optimum algorithm (really) for developing cooperation is to exhaust every opportunity for cooperation even from cheaters. They almost always come around, because it is always an advantage to come around. This was the entire message of christianity which was lost in the dogma. But it’s just science.

7. All our speech is merely a dance of negotiation so that we may create opportunities to acquire, do acquire, or preserve what we acquire. All of it is just signaling.

8. We are entirely incognizant of these behaviors because it is evolutionarily disadvantageous for us to be intuitively honest, honest with ourselves, and honest with others. This is the same reason we have many cognitive, social, and probabilistic biases in our genes. To keep us going when evidence would overwhelm us.

9. Most of the joy in life is playing this set of word games, cooperative games, and acquisition games with others so that we all acquire what we want as best we can without making others avoid us so that we can’t acquire what we want and need. This is why people commit suicide when they are lonely, and do not commit suicide when they are not.

10. Therefor the only rule of cooperation, of morality, and of law, is reciprocity: productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary cooperation with each other, and the only immoral actions are those that violate that moral rule by free riding, parasitism, theft, or predation. And that is why reciprocity is the basis of all traditional laws (and why it is not the basis of legislation).

This little list is the answer to nearly all of metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, sociology, ethics, and politics.